Re: articles

Henrik Theiling wrote on the etymology of the indefinite article 'a':

>Simply from 'one' I suppose.  In German, there's no difference.
In written German, that is. In spoken German, however, the meaning 'one' (as
in the translation of 'they have one car': sie haben ein Auto) is
distinguished by stress from the meaning 'a' (as in the translation of 'they
have a car': sie haben ein Auto).

(Of course, there's many different ways of distinguishing them in colloquial
German or in regional dialects of German, as Carsten Becker's pointed out.)

If I'm not wrong, the Dutch orthography distinguishes these two meaning by
an acute accent, which seems a splendid idea to me, and I'm sometimes
seduced to make the same use of the acute accent in German (sie haben éin Auto).

kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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